After adjusting for inflation, wages are higher than at any point in U.S. history, and after adjusting for age and sex, the percentage of the population that is employed is around its peak in U.S. history.
After adjusting for inflation, wages are higher than at any point in U.S. history, and after adjusting for age and sex, the percentage of the population that is employed is around its peak in U.S. history.
I guess that is one way to present a nice picture for the people at the top. Here’s the way I see it. This neo-liberal experiment has been a massive disaster. We’ve allowed the elites to dismantle so much of our social safety net, and all for what… cheap smart phones with facebook? The very same phones that help power the culture war. A war so devastating it has captured and rotted the brains of large segments of our population.
Meanwhile, we the general citizens have been getting fleeced in one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the public to the private. And what are these elites doing with all their new wealth? Buying up every available asset that can produce a dollar and writing the rules to benefit those with excessive wealth.
I’ll leave with an example from the housing market, because it has been so popular lately and because it is a perfect example of this wealth transfer. This is broad and general. People and institutions over extended themselves and got drunk on paper asset inflation during the housing bubble. The gov’t bailed out the big institutions and stuck the common people with the bill. This resulted in tighter lending for the regular home buyer and cheap available funds for institutions such as hedge funds. So tons of available housing stock sitting on bank’s balance sheets were easy pickings for funds.
It will truly be a shock to the owner class when after extracting every last bit of value out of the planet they realize that they can’t eat money.
They can’t breathe it either.
It won’t protect them from drought or super hurricanes.
The bunkers they are building to ride out the doom they are sowing will be protected by men. Men who today are willing to accepts their slips of paper. But when that paper becomes worthless, they will slit their throats and sleep in their beds.
They are piling up paper that will turn to ash and they think they are oh so clever. They’ve been able to buy off and escape accountability in almost every domain. But the extraction has taken its toll on the earth, the delicate balance that the ecosystem exists in and the damage they have done can’t be fixed by buying a senator or even building a bunker.
It may be the only solace the rest of us have, man seems incapable of holding this class accountable, but reality doesn’t care. The laws of physics will not bend as easily as the law of man, and they will sit there with their bank accounts full of zeroes and impotently slap at the cold cement walls of the prisons they’ve built for themselves and they will know fear.
It’s not just the top; since the pandemic, wages at the 20th percentile are rising again: